Reporting on youth suicide in Native communities requires a different approach

In my work as a health reporter in Indian Country, there are statistics that keep me up at night, and stories from which I can’t turn away.

Two years ago, one of those stories came across my desk. In October 2024, we reported on a study that identified Native American youth as having the highest suicide rate of any demographic.

The extreme health disparities that burden Native communities are built upon a long history that aimed to eradicate and disenfranchise them to the utmost degree. That history lingers into the present day: Native children and young adults are dying by suicide at rates that outpace any other group.

I knew where the failings were. The Indian Health Service is underfunded by $50 billion, leaving many tribes without the mental and behavioral health care they are promised by treaty rights. On many reservations, there simply is no one to call, no place to go, when faced with a mental health crisis. The risks of suicidal ideation are compounded in Native communities by generational trauma and genocide. 

These are the things I knew.

I also knew that tribes are strategically using cultural practices alongside Western mental and behavioral health care to heal their communities and potentially save lives.

My goal with my fellowship project was to tell that story.

I needed to find experts to help me examine how culture and sovereignty are critical to improving the efficacy of mental health care in Indian Country. What’s more, I needed to find a young Native American person who had survived suicidal ideation, a person who could carry readers through the story of a subject that makes most people deeply uncomfortable.

With support from the Center for Health Journalism National Fellowship, I produced two long-form pieces and two corresponding podcast episodes published on Native News Online, my home publication, and one of the only Native American-owned media companies in the United States.

Here is what I learned along the way.

Lesson 1: Just because you are ready to tell a story doesn’t mean the people most affected want you to.

In the early days of the fellowship, I intended to focus on an Arizona tribe’s groundbreaking prevention program that lowered its suicide rate by 50%. When it came time to book interviews, they declined to participate, citing the sensitivity of the subject matter and concerns about negative depictions of Native youth. It was the first of many doors that closed as I reached out to more than 30 tribes or tribal organizations that had received funding for culturally centered mental health programming. These closed doors, unanswered emails and calls were humbling, and told me that maybe I was not the person they felt like they could trust with the story, or that it was a story they were not ready to tell. This brings me to lesson two.

Lesson 2: Be ready to pivot.

My fellowship project went through half a dozen iterations as community after community declined to participate. I have spent years reporting on the overdose crisis in Indian Country, talking to tribal leaders, harm reduction workers, and community members about the scourge of fentanyl on their lands. I've never had an interview request declined, and as my byline has grown more recognizable, most people are willing to talk. I take the responsibility of these stories very seriously.  

But with youth suicide, with the loss of the most precious of lives, I realized that communities had no reason to trust me. That was something I was going to have to work with, to decenter my own ambition for the story and instead tell it in a way that didn’t cause further harm to the communities who have already suffered from previous media coverage.

With the overdose crisis, I had shown that I was going to stick around. I was not going to parachute in, extract a sensational story and never return. I hadn’t shown that yet with this story.

Lesson 3: Be transparent and vulnerable.

In the past four years, I have built relationships in Native communities that I deeply value. The topics I write about require me to ask people about the most difficult moments in their lives. In turn, I look for opportunities to share my most difficult moments, to offer my own vulnerability, to humanize myself as a journalist and as an outsider.

The reporter-source relationship in Indian Country is different. Indian Country has historically been exploited by mainstream media. Asking people to share their pain, and giving no piece of myself in return feels to me unethical and potentially cruel. This mutual vulnerability leads me on a path of discovery, rather than checking reporting boxes, and I believe it shines through in the end story.

Lesson 4: Talk to more people than you think you need to.

Give yourself a lot to work with. Once I landed on a direction that was yielding outreach results, I spoke with many, many people whose interviews didn’t make it to the finished articles. Those conversations helped build my understanding of my subject, informed my curiosity, and led me to the questions that begot the final story. Just because an interview isn’t in the final, it doesn’t mean it’s not essential.